Customer Complaints Stemming from Poor Inventory Control

Customer Complaints Stemming from Poor Inventory Control

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Many business owners state that the biggest challenge in administering their business comes in stock and inventory management. While many companies have organised methods of capital investment in inventory, over 43% of small companies have reported using manual processes or no tracking methods for handling their inventory.

Understanding your inventory requirements and a fair knowledge of stocks in hand should be the goal of a successful and viable inventory management system. While companies have a lot of similar products and various products segmented into sections based on price range and popularity, having every product segregation manually can be tedious and error prone. An automated system of inventory management can help businesses to keep a track of its inventory based on different segments and categories and also understand the demand trend on each product.

In case of a manual inventory control system, customers have to go through a lot of issues while dealing with these retailers like :-

1. Unorganised order delivery

In many ecommerce businesses, inventory mismanagement can cause a lot of unorganised product delivery. In many cases, either order are not taken properly by firms or they miss the details of order delivery due to unorganised tracking system and end up in a mismanaged delivery system.

A lot of customers raise concerns of wrong products or delivery at the wrong times to be done from organisation who have manual ways of tracking orders for their inventory.

2. Delayed delivery

Starting from inventory procurement to the end delivery to customers, every minute details needs to managed and organised by the business processes. If the organised system is not in place, it often causes in which raw material is not obtained or delayed from suppliers, or the order delivery is not done on time due to internal mismanaged of product handling and packing.

All these issues of delivery delay may cause huge losses for businesses and create an unsatisfied customer experience with the organisation.

3. Mismanaged return processes

In case we have unorganised product management system, many cases might be reported of incorrect or bad quality products to be delivered to end customers. In this case, many customers either decline to accept the delivery or call for a return. In both cases, a proper channel of item return needs to be maintained to gain confidence of customers to handle unforeseen circumstances. But an organisation of mismanaged inventory system will either not take the return system diligently or mismanage the process as well.

These returns and repetitive transport expenses for product delivery causes great losses and inventory pile ups for the businesses.

4. Lost merchandise

As we all know, if we don’t take care of our things, someone else would. Many manual inventory systems complain about lost merchandise or no records of raw material deliveries. These can easily be possible if you don’t have a proper channel through which inventory is tracked in and out of your warehouses.

In most of the cases, employees who know the limitations of the process will be involved to leverage the unorganised processes in the business and take advantage of no tracking of products in the warehouses.

A lot of startups and small companies face business failure due to these unorganised and illegal inventory mismanagement.

How can an Inventory CRM software help?

1. Inventory auditing

Auditing your products on a regular basis is one of the keys to manage your inventory efficiently. Many small scale companies either do not audit their warehouses ever or do it on an annual basis, These cause a lot of reordering and lost merchandise due to improper vigilance of the warehouse whereabouts.

Routine check and regular auditing for every quarter or monthly will help in keeping a check on the inventory movement for the warehouses.

2. Organised product data

SalesBabuCRMis a cloud based inventory management software which provides an organized system of data storage and management through a centralised database. This database will be accessible by different stakeholders at ant time. Every product entering or leaving the warehouse, respective delivery dates, contact information, quantity order and more, everything is clearly recorded in these database which helps in an organised system of delivery management and raw material tracking.

Also, SalesBabuCRM provides various challans and GRN to the end customers to track the quality and quantity of delivery done and acknowledge it with the feedback in real time. This creates a mode of trust between the customers and business management and takes our business to new heights of success.

3. Demand forecasting and analysis

Once we understand our demand supply chain better, we will be in a better place to track and manage our stock in a more organised manner. SalesBabu CRM provides an efficient inventory management system to avoid poor inventory control by demand forecasting the appropriate amount of stock requirements in our warehouses.

SalesBabu Inventory CRM has numerous in-build and customer report generation facilities which can help to understand the demand trends of various products and create statistics and forecast mechanism of the required stock for the business.

Also, with these reports we can also track the returned or improper delivery done by service agents to understand the reasons of these customer complains and check on the specification of the root cause. These proactive methods help in reducing product return cases and improve our overall business profitability.

4. Get Rid of obsolete stock

Old and obsolete stock is another cause of inventory mismanagement. In many cases, small scale companies, pile up a lot of old and returned stocks which cause mismanaged and unorganised warehouse stocking. It causes no space for new stock and also leads to lost merchandise due to theft and mishandling of products.

Steps of promotional sales or discount offers should be applied on old stocks to reduce it from warehouse and use the space for products in demand.

5. Just in time Inventory (JIT) method

JIT inventory methods helps in ordering only the required amount of stocks for the storage which helps in better handling of limited amount of products and also avoids mishandling and theft cases.

Also, JIT methods helps in avoiding over stocking and free up a lot of liquid cash of the organisation which can be invested in better product procurement methods.

6. Reduce Lead time

The reason behind delay in delivery is majorly due to increased lead time from the suppliers. If the suppliers are late, so will be the final production and delivery to end customers.Lead time reduction from the suppliers helps in inventory management in following ways:

With customer centricity as the talk of the town, companies can’t afford to have customer complaints stemming up an inventory business. SalesBabuCRM acts as the perfect bridge between the end customer and the business to create a systematic and organised management system of the stock in the warehouses